1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing fluid cartridge configured to be mounted to a cartridge mounting portion and to a printing fluid supply device comprising the printing fluid cartridge and the cartridge mounting portion.
2. Description of Related Art
An image recording apparatus that uses ink to record an image on a sheet of recording paper has been conventionally known. The image recording apparatus has a recording head of an inkjet recording method and selectively ejects ink droplets from nozzles of the recording head toward the sheet of recording paper. When the ink droplets land on the sheet of recording paper, a desired image is recorded on the recoding paper. The image recording apparatus has an ink cartridge that stores ink to be supplied to the recording head. The ink cartridge can be removably mounted to a mounting portion of the image recording apparatus. The ink cartridge may be equipped with a circuit board on which an IC chip is mounted. The IC chip stores data about the color and material of ink stored in the ink cartridge, a remaining amount of ink, a maintenance state, and the like. Contact terminals on the circuit board are brought into electric contact with connection terminals provided at the mounting portion when the ink cartridge is mounted to the mounting portion, enabling the data stored in the IC chip to be read out. Such an image recording apparatus is disclosed in JP-A-2007-237657 for example.
When an ink cartridge is mounted to a mounting portion, an ink supply tube of the mounting portion is inserted into an ink supply portion of the ink cartridge. Therefore, the ink cartridge needs to be accurately positioned such that the ink supply portion is aligned with the ink supply tube. The ink cartridge also needs to be accurately positioned such that the contact terminals on the circuit board of the ink cartridge are aligned with the connection terminals of the mounting portion for the contact terminals to come into contact with the connection terminals. Nevertheless, it may be difficult to achieve high dimensional precision with which the ink supply portion and ink supply tube are aligned and the contact terminals and connection terminals are aligned.